The politics of contaminated meat

By this time, you must have heard about the study in Clinical Infectious Diseases sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The study found nearly half of supermarket meat and poultry samples to be contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus. Half of the contaminated samples were resistant to multiple antibiotics.

Staph causes awful infections. When I was a child, my mother had a Staph infection that kept her out of commission for what seemed like months in that pre-antibiotic era. Antibiotics can keep Staph under control, but not if the Staph are antibiotic-resistant. Staph resistant to multiple drugs are a clear-and-present danger. No wonder this study got so much attention.

The study provides strong support for the idea that we ought to be reducing use of antibiotics as growth promoters in farm animals, an idea strongly supported by the CDC.

Even though 80% of U.S. antibiotic use is for farm animals, the meat industry strong opposes any proposal to change its practices.

“Calling into question the safety of U.S. beef without conclusive scientific evidence is careless and misleads consumers. Pew Charitable Trusts, an agenda-driven organization on this issue, funded this study, which concludes that its extremely small sample size was ‘insufficient to accurately estimate prevalence rates’ and that ‘public health relevance of this finding is unclear.’ The study’s authors clearly call into question the validity of their own study. The bottom-line is U.S. beef is safe and is part of a healthy, well-balanced diet.“

The American Meat Institute reassures the public that meat is safe. After all, you are going to cook your meat, aren’t you? In any case, the responsibility rests with you.

“While the study claims that the many of the bacteria found were antibiotic resistant, it does note that they are not heat resistant. These bacteria are destroyed through normal cooking procedures, which may account for the small percentage of foodborne illnesses linked to these bacteria.

As with any raw agricultural product, it is important to follow federal safe handling recommendations included on every meat and poultry package that urge consumers to wash hands and surfaces when handling raw meat and poultry and to separate raw from cooked foods to ensure that food is safe when served.“

These sound like the arguments that the meat industry has made for years for Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7.

I see this study as another reason why we need better food safety regulation, and the sooner the better.

Postscript: Bill Marler reports that he had 100 samples of chicken tested from Seattle markets:

IEH Labs found S. aurea [sic], or staph, in 42 percent of the samples overall and Campylobacter in 65 percent. The supermarket chicken was contaminated with other pathogens as well: 19 percent of the samples tested positive for Salmonella, one tested positive for Listeria, and 10 percent showed the presence of the methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). In an unusual finding, one of the chicken samples tested positive for E. coli 0126, Shiga-toxin producing E. coli (STEC) bacteria more likely to be a contaminant of beef than poultry. Organic Chicken proved to be slightly less contaminated than nonorganic with 7 of the 13 (54%) testing positive for harmful bacteria.“

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health and Professor of Sociology at New York University. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley.

She is the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism and What to Eat.

Her most recent book is Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, published by University of California Press in 2008.

Comments

I think that this feeding antibiotics to earm animals should be stoped and only used if the animals are sick. I k ow from milking cows that a sample was taken at every pickup and checked for bacteraand if found you were notified quickly. I don’t know if the sample was checked for antibiotics but you was supposed to dump the milk of a cow being treated for at least 48 hrs after treatment.you want belive the internal and external parasites that are present in all animals.just do search on your pc on internal parasites anit will give you some and helpful info.it will tell you how you can become infected from your beloved pets. your whole house can be contaminatedand some are hard to get rid of and most of these parasites can cause lots of health problems.you need to treat your pets at least rvery 3 months and your self at least twice a year.if your pets are in your house it needs to be cieaned as often as you can.regular floor vaccum an even drapes or curtauns and beds. you just can’t be too clean.wash your hands after handling pets and always wash your hands before eating or drinking any thing.

I don’t understand why this story is getting so much more attention than David Kirby’s expose which shows the meat-problem is much worse than JUST antibiotic-resistant microbes which, after all, can be killed with heat:

“Based on our review, we found that the national residue program is not accomplishing its mission of monitoring the food supply for harmful residues,” the USDA’s oversight office wrote. The audit revealed that USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), along with the FDA and EPA, “have not established thresholds for many dangerous substances (e.g., copper or dioxin), which has resulted in meat with these substances being distributed in commerce.”

Even worse, the federal government does not attempt to recall meat, “even when its tests have confirmed the excessive presence of veterinary drugs,” the audit said.